Grind in the Pacific with iFighter 2

Posted by on August 8, 2012 in Reviews

In the course of exploring shmups on the iPad, iFighter 2 is a game I found myself playing mostly because it was free. It seemed like one of those “how bad can it be?” games that is going to answer the question exactly as I expected, at which point I would promptly uninstall it and go play something worth the 99 cents it cost.

But because iFighter 2 is free, it has a money sink into which you can pour real world money. But unlike most free games into which you can pour real world money, there’s really no need to pour money into iFighter 2. If you’re content to play through the levels several times over — also called “trying to get a better score” and a cornerstone of any effective shmup — then iFighter 2 will inevitably dump its buyables into your lap. The F4F, then the P-38, then the B-25, with different sets of wingmen that fire in various directions. Later you can also buy powerups, which is probably where the iFighter 2 whales dump their cash and definitely where the pursuit of a high score loses any allure. In other words, the more you play, the better the stuff you get, and the higher your score. You’re basically buying your way or grinding your way to a higher score with bigger better planes, skill be damned.

This is both its strength and weakness. If you play shmups because you like to wrestle with cool scoring systems, there’s not much here for you. But if you play shmups for the mindlessness of dodging bullets and watching things blow up, this is a viable choice: crisp, lively, loud, busy, obligingly World War II. And if you want a shmup based on unlocking stuff so you’ll do better next time by no virtue of whether you’ve actually gotten better at the game, iFighter 2 is the shmup to beat.

3 stars
iOS

  • Pogue Mahone

    So it’s a free game that looks like a 194X clone? Oh yeah, I’m all over this.

  • http://twitter.com/WarpRattler Evaccaneer DOOM

    And this is where the disconnect between eastern and western shmup design (and how neatly it ties into smartphone game monetization) rears its ugly head.

    Japanese shmup design in general moved toward BULLETS EVERYWHERE, incomprehensibly tiny hitboxes, and intricate (sometimes overly so) score systems, as well as incentives for completing entire games on a single credit and as carefully as possible, like large end bonuses for lives and bombs remaining, a more difficult second loop with an extra final boss if you fulfill various conditions in the first run, and the common (and rather painful) score reset on continue. No real problems there; the genre was still strong in arcades for a long time, and Cave-style bullet hell became pretty popular, so of course developers catered to their audience. You also have the Touhou Project series, which brought bullet hell to a PC audience, along with about a billion other doujin shmups.

    Meanwhile, the west…more or less made R-TYPE clones, slow horizontal shmups with checkpoints and levels designed around memorizing mazes, for a long time. Sometimes they made vertical shooters as well (see “classics” like Raptor and Tyrian), but regardless of orientation, a lot of western shmups had (and still have) some features that really hurt them for a lot of hardcore players. Some of the most common ones include inertia (a big no-no for a genre based around precision), shop systems requiring a lot of grinding (as you described in iFighter 2; this is, of course, the part that ties into smartphone gaming), healthbars (often abused in conjunction with undodgeable bullet patterns), basic enemies that can’t be killed unless you invest time into grinding for the aforementioned shop systems, limited ammunition for standard weapons (shooooop systemssssss), mouse controls (easy mode), and generic stories that no one playing the game would ever actually care about but that are still shoved in your face with cutscenes and such. Nowadays devs have ditched a lot of that, but largely in favor of Geometry Wars clones, which aren’t much better. (Especially on touch-based platforms, because then you get into virtual gamepads, which I’d still rather not talk about.)

    These don’t have to be problems, of course. Just look at Fantasy Zone, Trouble Witches, and Crimzon Clover, which all feature shop systems in some capacity; Deathsmiles, Guwange, and Akai Katana, which feature healthbars; and Castle Shikigami and the aforementioned Touhou Project games, which beat you over the head with in-game dialogue. It’s largely the implementation that causes problems, and it’s generally even worse with smartphone games, where a shop system changes from “have fun grinding forever” to “here’s an option to spend real money to be stupidly powerful, if you don’t want to grind for *two forevers*.” To this end, I personally would rate something like iFighter 2 lower than something like Dariusburst SP, because Dariusburst is properly playable without an endless grind, and has the courtesy of showing you its real price tag up front, even if it seems absurdly high for an iOS game. (I’d put half of Deathsmiles iOS above both and the other half somewhere between the two, since it has the standard game along with a shop-based grindfest mode that lets you spend real money on better stuff.)

  • http://twitter.com/BaggerMcGuirk Patrick Casey

    I get the impression the best will be saved for last? Also it would not surprise me if “Grind in the Pacific” was found to be the title of a lost Andy Sidaris film.

  • Scott McNeill

    This seems like a good summary of a genre I have practically no history with, so thank you for sharing!

  • anon

    Seems antithetical to the genre to me, or at least an example of why “euroshmup” is often seen as a derogatory term(probably not a european game, but the term seems kind of like jrpg, indie and other such nonsense).

    Jamestown does earning something persistent for playing without destroying its integrity. You’ll have unlocked everything fairly fast though, and have to reach skill based milestones to buy everything too.

  • AladdinHiba

    If it is accurate to assume the people on this thread play iFighter, than what would you propose as a farming/grinding tactic? Currently I find leaving the plane on its own on the third level, (Easy, Medium, or Hard depending on how far you’ve gotten) gets a fair amount (1000+ on Hard) per game if you just put the B25 with its four F4U’s and leave it. It’ll get most of the way through the level and always die on the boss, and I just wait for the music to change and know the plane died, and exit to menu to do the level over.

    If anyone has a better tactic, I would be overjoyed to hear it. Beating the last level only gets the 10,000 reward once, I believe.

    And if I’m posting on a long-dead thread… so be it.